I've heard this is part of why major infrastructure projects in America can be so expensive. A city builds one subway line, and everyone working on the project has no experience, so it takes a long time and is expensive. The expense convinces people to oppose any more projects, so the city doesn't build any public transit for a decade(s). By the time they're ready to build another line, all the experience has evaporated, so the new line takes a long time and is expensive. Repeat forever.
pm215 · 17m ago
There's an example of this in railway electrification: if you scroll down to the graph in https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5801/cmselect/cmtran... it shows that the UK tends to do electrification as occasional big projects, whereas Germany has consistently done about the same mileage every year for decades, presumably with the same institutions maintaining their expertise and just moving on to the next bit of track. Their costs are a quarter of the UK's...
antisthenes · 30m ago
That makes sense. It seems like during the continuous "building up America" period of the late 40s through mid 70s there was no problem of getting shit done at reasonable cost, because of continuously available institutional knowledge.
Once large infrastructure projects become sporadic in nature, you begin to run into issues.
The solution has to be continuous stimulus, but that also runs into problems of corruption and capture by special interests (the longer the stimulus, the more incentive there is for 3rd parties to appropriate funds).
stouset · 20m ago
Somehow, other nations have managed to figure this out. Of the developed world, seemingly only Americans are resigned to the belief that such things are sadly impossible.
tolerance · 26m ago
Perhaps tangentially related Re: “Chesterfield’s plug", Chesterton’s fence came to mind today while mulling over this sort of “forgetfulness” (which tends toward outright negligence) in my own circles.
> What happened next, you may not be surprised to hear, comes in different versions. The person who spotted that there might be a problem may have been a member of Her Majesty’s Constabulary…
>> While they were away, a passing policeman noticed an extraordinary whirlpool in the normally placid canal. He also noticed that the water level was falling. He rushed off to find the dredging gang. By the time they all returned, the canal had disappeared. It was then that realisation dawned. Jack and his men had pulled out the plug of the canal. One-and-a-half miles of waterway had gone down the drain.
> It may have been three anglers who raised the alarm, and given that they have names — Howard Poucher, Graham Boon and Pete Moxon — maybe that version’s true. Another telling says it wasn’t until the evening that
>> local police contacted Stuart Robinson, the British Waterways section inspector.
freedomben · 34m ago
Apologies for bring in "AI" to a non-AI thread, but I really do think that things will be a game changer for institutional memory, both at recording it and recovering it. I don't personally use them but I have many coworkers that use AI tools to join meetings and get summaries/transcriptions aftward that they can read or query (also using AI). As people get more used to it, I would imagine that sort of thing becomes standard practice (regardless of whether or not it should, but that's a different topic)
RcouF1uZ4gsC · 28m ago
This misses something very important.
Institutional memory is not information or documents - it's people.
Every single real-world process has implicit knowledge. And you can't always capture that knowledge of paper.
But, many corporations seem to want to get rid of their most experienced people to save money and have better quarterly results for the stock market.
Once large infrastructure projects become sporadic in nature, you begin to run into issues.
The solution has to be continuous stimulus, but that also runs into problems of corruption and capture by special interests (the longer the stimulus, the more incentive there is for 3rd parties to appropriate funds).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
Solid writing.
> What happened next, you may not be surprised to hear, comes in different versions. The person who spotted that there might be a problem may have been a member of Her Majesty’s Constabulary…
>> While they were away, a passing policeman noticed an extraordinary whirlpool in the normally placid canal. He also noticed that the water level was falling. He rushed off to find the dredging gang. By the time they all returned, the canal had disappeared. It was then that realisation dawned. Jack and his men had pulled out the plug of the canal. One-and-a-half miles of waterway had gone down the drain.
> It may have been three anglers who raised the alarm, and given that they have names — Howard Poucher, Graham Boon and Pete Moxon — maybe that version’s true. Another telling says it wasn’t until the evening that
>> local police contacted Stuart Robinson, the British Waterways section inspector.
Institutional memory is not information or documents - it's people.
Every single real-world process has implicit knowledge. And you can't always capture that knowledge of paper.
But, many corporations seem to want to get rid of their most experienced people to save money and have better quarterly results for the stock market.